(2 of 3)
Yes, it does, the reader thinks, his eyes opened by Morgan's perception of Americans as "the true existentialists ... Anxiety is the price that must be paid for boundless opportunity, including the opportunity to cheat the system, and not everyone can handle it." But passion does not improve the reasoning process, and when the author supports his arguments with windy civics lectures and careless unravelings from U.S. history, he can be more provocative than illuminating. Cases in point include a lame paragraph that seeks to prove "a high incidence of breakdown among men and women in public life" by linking the troubles of Explorer Meriwether Lewis (who died in 1809, probably a suicide, in "a seedy tavern"), Major General Edwin A. Walker (arrested in a Dallas men's room in 1976 for public lewdness), and Pat Nixon ("stress-related stroke"). This is simply idle, and a spongy chapter relating the life of New York City's Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who was neither an immigrant nor a name changer but is gathered into Morgan's embrace anyway, is not much better.
Still, the book is so amiable and loose-jointed, perhaps like the U.S. itself, that the reader is happy to wade through balderdash to the next bit of good storytelling or good sense. Meanwhile, what about this name change? Why Morgan? Why not Carnegie or Rockefeller? Why not Svensen or Von Humboldt or Verrazanno or Sun Yatsen? Well, Morgan explains, he threw away his first name, Sanche—a contraction of St. Charles —and scrambled the letters of De Gramont. Among the anagrams that resulted were Dr. Montage, R.D. Megaton and Ted Morgan. Morgan, he felt, was someone you would lend your car to. Dogs and small children would like him.
Nancy Morgan objected that the anagram was a "remuddling of an already felt confusion." His brother George, both a De Gramont and a brand manager for Lipton Tea, said that Morgan was throwing away a valuable brand name. (Sanche de Gramont had written several books, including an astringent national portrait, The French, and a good popular history of the Niger River, The Strong Brown God.) The author ignored all this and became Morgan.
Is he displaying a Gallic idiosyncrasy or an American one? Both. Is that his business, not anyone else's? Yes. Is name changing an American quirk? Absolutely, says this SuperAmerican. Look at Natasha Gurdin (Natalie Wood); Marcus Rothkowitz (Mark Rothko); Michael Igor Peschkowsky (Mike Nichols). If Columbus had hung around, he might have called himself Collins. By the end of the volume does the reader feel a giddy temptation to throw away his own first name and mess around with the letters of the rest? As De Gramont-Morgan proves, that requires a lot of thought. — S. Wok (formerly John Skow)
Excerpt
"Things change so fast that historians, who used to study the meaning of centuries (eighteenth-century France, nineteenth-century England), now scrutinize America decade by decade: what were the sixties about? Are the seventies a return to the fifties?